Irredeemable

IRREDEEMABLE #1 - Mark Waid & Peter Krause (Boom! Studios, 2009)

Afterword by Grant Morrison

In a recent email to Mark Waid, I found myself grumping and moaning about this concept of “patterning” and how ill-served by it all I, personally, was feeing that day. We’d both read the same, somewhat disheartening article in New Scientist magazine, wherein it was explained that once a given group has categorized you under one convenient heading or another, it becomes pretty much impossible to shake the tag, even by acting differently.

For me, this simply confirmed a horrible suspicion that no matter how watertight I might try to make my plots, no matter how well-structured my narrative became, no matter how conventionally I organized my ideas, I would always be regarded in comics fan circles as the madcap purveyor of free-form gibberish. I saw future generations scratching their heads over the wording on my overgrown tombstone, declaring “incomprehensible” the simple name of the simple soul below.

As for Mark Waid, the specter - or “category” as we scientists like to call it – that haunted his career was conjured up form a mouldering grave no less confining.

For some reason, towards the end of the last decade, Mark Waid was saddled with an inexplicable reputation as the Stirling Sentinel of Silver Age Nostalgia comics. Curiously misrepresented as the defender of Kennedy-era values, the examplar of the devoted fan-turned-pro, Waid became the go-to geek as the vogue in funnybooks turned briefly to unironically old-fashioned, Julius Schwartz-style sci-fi dad fests. When an aging readership cried out with one ravenous beak for a return to the days of Ollie, Barry, Hal or Larry, Sally, Ray, Rita, Jack, Bobby, Sue, John, Paul, George and Ringo too, Mark Waid was the first guy on the editorial speed dial. Waid, it was decided, would bring the necessary gee-whiz, “If I wasn’t doing this for money, I’d do it for free!” mixture of wide-eyed wonder and bug-eyed delusion the task of refreshing these pop icons of yesteryear required.

And yet, this was the write of The Flash. How could that run of streamlined, electric stories, those comics so super-charged with the raw voltage of modernity that they thrummed and kicked in the readers’ hands, ever give any indication that Mark Waid favoured the traditional and comfortable? How could the writer of Kingdom Come’s state-of-the-art farewell to the old guard find himself declared the representative and advocate of an “Age” taht he himself had cleverly and carefully closed the door on?

Even now, against all evidence to the contrary, and even after his creation of “Wicker Sue”, that ultimate, unforgettably abnormal symbol of hopeless loss and love become horror and madness, there are still people who insist on imagining Waid as some faithful, owlish archivist, alphabetically arranging the 4-color debris of his youth.

So it was in consideration of all this that I composed my disgruntled e-mail, blaming patterning and flip categorization for everything that was, and will be wrong with the world. Sometimes, especially when it’s cold and dark and wet and miserable, which is nine-tenths of the year here, living in Scotland can inspire a kind of genuine, no-bull, soul-gloom and New Scientist had done nothing but stoke the black furnace.

Writing from another radiant, sunlit night in Los Angeles however, Waid dismissed the findings of New Scientist by reminding me of the famous Elvis ’68 TV special, when the all-but-neutered, out-of-touch King of Rock ‘n’ Roll reinvented himself as a relaxed and human God in Leathers. The rest being history.

To be honest, as willing as I was at the time to conced how expertly Waid had refuted patterning by this example of Elvis Presley, the more I was sure of a fundamental flaw in the argument. Before I could figure out what it was, however, a far more convincing proof arrived in the form of electronic mail from... Mark Waid! I opened two files entitled “Irredeemable 1 FINAL” and “Irredeemable 2 FINAL” and as I read through the scripts contained within, the concept of patterning was reduced to a parcel of half-baked, pseudo-scientific confetti before my grateful eyes.

It’s not that I haven’t been watching him hone his skills across a number of reent projects. Look through the last few years of Mark’s work and you can see him trying out new tricks, absorbing new influences, saving what works, and re-interpreting and refining it all through his own vigorous filtration system. His recent work on corporate icon characters has been pitch perfect while his own new creations and concepts have displayed a growing range, power, and clarity. It’s clear he’s been working towards something big.

And so, Irredeemable.

Those New Scientist conversations developed out of a brief discussion on the corrosive effects of relentless Internet criticism on human self-esteem. Waid has jokingly referred to the Internet as the “Zone-O-Phone” and it seems to me a chillingly apt comparison. The Zone-O-Phone was Superman’s window onto the Phantom Zone, a twilight world of bodiless murderers, serial killers, war criminals and madmen, where the greatest criminals of the planet Krypton endured permanent exile in a disembodied hell. The Zone-O-Phone was Superman’s hotline to a jeering crowd of phantoms with nothing better to do than to insult, taunt and threaten the Man of Steel for all eternity.

In Irredeemable, Mark imagines a superman who has spent a few too many hours at the Zone-O-Phone screen. The Plutonian is a charcter whose heart has been poisoned, whose belief in the essential goodness of human nature has been rotted to thread by a steady drip, drip of insinuation, scorn and criticism. What happens to a superhero who can’t stop overhearing just how much he’s hated and mocked by the people around him? And what would be the result if all the antipathy, jealousy and lies finally just killed his soul?

It’s a simple, elegant and terrifying concept and better yet, it’s in the hands of someone who knows exactly how to make the most of it. This is the comic only Mark Waid, who loves Superman more than anyone living or dead, could write. On first read, it feels like being caught in the jet of a high-powered hose filled with hydrochloric acid. The energy of the storytelling is immense but it’s harnessed to a laser-eye vision and executed with a grasp of plt dynamics that is simply awe-inspiring.

If you ever find yourself lying on a sterile bed with your internal organs glistering under the overheads, you’ll be praying for a surgeon who can cut and edit with this kind of thrilling bravura. From the opening sequence of narrative detonations through the massive turns and reveals in every single scene, this is ‘what happens next??...’ storytelling evolved into a super-predator. This is blindfold open-heart surgery with a samurai sword. This is any number of metaphors I could invoke to hint at the simple, devastating work of a master telling a comic book story, just so. Just like that. And that. The sweeping confidence in the construction of this beautiful machine makes me grin with delight every time I read it, and bear in mind I haven’t seen any of this with art. I’ve seen the naked skeleton and the programming language, the precise written instructions that the artist renders up into comic-book form. I’ve only seen the Terminator under the skin of this book so far, and what I’ve seen is all precision-engineered whirring gears, glistening chrome and diamond-ecthed circuitry. As a technical and structural achievement, it’s a ‘How to...’ handbook for every other writer in the field. As a super-adventure story for the 21^st century, it’s a page-turning monster of a read.

Irredeemable is brilliant, hard-edged, progressive super-hero comics. There’s no trace of nostalgia, no backing down from the horror s it summons onto the page.

It’s big and resonant and it rides the zeitgeist like Roy Rogers rode Trigger. Clever, dark and frightnening, it dares to look directly into the demonic churn of recrimination, fear, entitlement and rage that drives our media discourse. It spits venom across the you’re-too-thin, too-fat, too-clever, too-stupid, too-old, too-young, too-flawed, too-human black hole of self-loathing judgement taht spins at the centre of our culture and threatens to devour us all.

Irredeemable dares to show us what might happen when the best in us is finally brought low by the worst in us. And, more frighteningly, ir shows what happens next.

This story has real fuel in its tank, its urgent roar tells us that this is Mark Waid’s darkest nightmare and his best revenge all at once, served cold and bitter. I can’t wait to read more.

This then, is the proof I needed, the proof that the Elvis ’68 special could not entirely provide; if you thought you knew what Mark Waid was capable of, think again. That glorious, apocalyptic noise you hear is the sound of categories shattering.

Grant Morrison

Glasgow, Scotland, March 2009